Because of the increase of the analog and digital mixed circuit design and/or a lack of analog circuit designers, demands to utilize analog circuits, which were designed in the past, as Intellectual Property (IP) are increasing. When IP data is reused, optimization by a manufacturing process designated according to the circuit specification or selection of the optimum manufacturing process is carried out. Therefore, the optimization technique considering the manufacturing process is requested.
At present, various techniques for the automatic circuit design and circuit optimization exist. However, the designer carries out a lot of circuit simulations, and it may take several days to determine the circuit configuration and parameters for the circuit configuration. As a matter of course, when the designer manually carries out the design and optimization without using such techniques for the automatic circuit design and circuit optimization, not only it takes a long time so much, but also the quality and/or period required for the design may vary depending on the skill level of the designer. Furthermore, the period for the optimization work tends to increase, because of the process miniaturization.
As described above, there is no technique to rapidly reduce the turn around time for the automatic circuit design and optimization.